Docomo was thought to be the oldest emoji set, with designs dating back to 1999. Then Softbank was thought to be the oldest emoji set with their emojis dating back to 1997. Five years later, a few even older emoji sets have resurfaced online. Sharp the oldest emoji set from 1988 (plus revised 1994 designs), NEC the second oldest emoji set from 1990, and Pocket Bell from 1995.
All of these very early emoji sets were in black and white. But what about the first full color emoji set? I'm assuming the first full color emojis were made in the early to mid 1990s, and I'm interested to know if that's true. If anyone digs up the first full color emoji set that predates the Softbank emoji set from 1999, let me know! It's possible we might recover emoji/emoticon sets from the 2000s as well.
You can see that they have color emoticons in 2002 which are close to what we would consider emojis.
I also feel like I saw message boards back in the day with built in smileys. Are we counting those as emojis? Because those were definitely around in the early 2000s.